The Enchantment Of Lily Dahl
Siri Hustvedt
Hardcover
(Niagara, Feb. 1, 1999)
Lily Dahl works as a waitress in the shabby but hospitable Ideal Cafe, situated at the heart of the small town of Webster, Minnesota. This is where the mysterious Bodler twins come for breakfast, two old men who deal junk and never wash, men who are forever marked by the gruesome murder of their mother by their father. It is where Martin Petersen comes to look at Lily, and where his dogged obsession begins to take the form of a threat. Over the course of a summer, Lily is changed by all the people around her, but she is also changed by the ghosts they carry with them and by her own ghosts.